Tuesday 17 February 2015

Murder in Croydon - a Very Local Death

In April, 2014, a 52 year old man, Andrew Else, was stabbed to death on a Croydon street by a paranoid schizophrenic, 24 year old Ephraim Norman. Two weeks before, Norman had stabbed a 15 year old boy in the neck. At Norman's trial:
"Prosecutor Alan Kent QC said the teenager was "lucky" to survive after the blade was completely buried in his head with the tip poking out the other side."
Two weeks later, Norman followed Mr Else off a bus, then attacked him, stabbing Mr Else 200 times. Norman, who has been confined indefinitely to hospital treatment (hopefully), said that he felt no remorse for his deeds, or sympathy for Mr Else's family, because voices in his head were urging him on to kill:
"He told officers: "It is just my madness, it is just like how my mind is.... I know I could do that again. It is not a big thing for me to do ... I wanted him to die so much I just kept on stabbing him until he was dead".
Like other offenders of this type, it seems that Norman had stopped taking medication for his condition:
"The court was told that Norman attacked the teenager and Mr Else after he stopped taking his medication and claimed it made him impotent."
The judge who sentenced Norman said that Andrew Else was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as I can discover, no-one is being held to account for letting such an obviously dangerous man like Norman out on the streets in the first place.
I happened upon this story by accident. It is on the BBC London news section of their website, but has been given no great prominence. I find this alarming, not only because of the horrific nature of this killing, but because of the serious implications of failure in our mental health system. It raises the same questions that occurred to me when I wrote, in 2013, about the Nicola Edgington murder. Put simply, the questions are: How many murders are committed by released mental health patients? Why is it happening? Who is responsible?
For answers, I turn to the "Hundred Families" website, so called because, as it says on its Home Page:
"Around a 100 families a year will have a loved one killed by someone with mental illness."
The evidence for this is overwhelming; the website lists all known killings by mental health patients going back into the 1990s. In London alone, there were 272 known cases between 1993 and 2014; in the North West of England, during that period, there were 129 known cases. It is important to stress "known cases", as, in many murder and assault cases, the mental health problems of the perpetrators are not mentioned.
Julian Hendy, who runs the website, and whose own father was murdered in the street by a man with mental health problems, argues that this is happening because:
  • Many Mental Health Services are in denial about violence
  • They are failing to investigate properly
  • They are failing to learn lessons
  • They have a culture of secrecy
  • They treat symptoms not causes
  • Psychotic patients often don’t think they’re ill
  • This explains why these murders keep happening, in my opinion. It is also the opinion of many relatives of the victims. Jennifer Mills-Westley, a 60 year old woman, was decapitated by a Bulgarian, Deyan Deyanov, in 2011. Although the murder happened in Spain, Deyanov had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act and admitted to Glan Clwyd Hospital’s Ablett Psychiatric Unit in North Wales in the summer of 2010. Leaving the unit, he moved to Tenerife, where his schizophrenia deteriorated, leading to murder. Mrs Mills-Westley's family sought the truth and , in a statement, laid the blame at the door of the mental health managers who released Deyanov. Here is an extract from their statement:
    "Three and a half years after the brutal murder of our mother we now know the truth leading up to that tragic events on Friday 13th May 2011.
    The Health Inspectorate of Wales report has highlighted a number of significant basic medical best practice failures. These failings are far worse than we had imagined.
    We are shocked to learn that the clearly prejudicial views of the medical staff severely compromised the diagnosis and therefore subsequent treatment of Deyan Deyanov.
    Had Betsi Cadwaladr recognised that Deyan Deyanov was a young man with very serious mental health problems then our mother would still be alive today."
    Now, it can be argued that mental health diagnosis is very difficult, and it is not always possible to judge the future actions of such patients upon release. This may be true, but the fact remains that there are far too many of these murders. So far, released mental health patients have killed more British citizens in the past 20 years than have Jihadi terrorists and the IRA.
    To conclude, I would like to express my sympathy to the relatives of all such murder victims as described here. In particular, I send my condolences to the family of Andrew Else, whose horrific death was not thought of sufficient interest to be included on the national news. How sad it is, that the murder of a victim of some faceless person's decision to set at liberty a murderous schizophrenic should be thought of as being purely of local interest.

    Friday 13 February 2015

    Education, Politicians and Conjuring Tricks

    Readers of this blog will know that I have the habit of making cynical assessments of OFSTED and the "initiatives" in Education advanced by "concerned" politicians. Before I retired from full time teaching, I was accused several times of being a cynic (usually by Headteachers). My reply was always the same -  there was only one thing wrong with being a cynic about education - I was always right.
    Two recent events, which I believe to be nothing more than political sleights of hand,  have done nothing to change my view. One is the recent change in school league results, which is, as Richard Garner said in the Independent :
    "...a result of changes to the tables which make it harder for schools to obtain top grade passes.
    First of all, those who allow their pupils to sit the IGCSE exam – the international equivalent of GCSE’s based on traditional O-level lines – have been told the exam is no longer recognised for the tables. 
    Secondly, only the first sitting of an exam counts towards the tables – thus stopping many schools attempting to bump up by their grades by allowing pupils to sit the exam early and then retake it if they do not get the correct pass rate."
    So, at the stroke of a pen (or a wave of the wand?), schools which were thought to be doing well, suddenly are not doing well at all. This has caused much dismay in the schools themselves and understandable anger on the part of the teaching unions. Perceptive commentators have noted that these new league table results will be used by this government to advance their policy of creating educational academies. Quite right, but there are a number of aspects that have not been noticed.
    To begin with, there is the question of OFSTED inattention. By this I mean: if any schools are not now up to a good standard, why has OFSTED not detected it before? After all, they have been in existence for two decades, and never seem to achieve a perfect school system.
    Next, arising from my first point, I think it obvious that OFSTED does not want perfection (whatever that may look like), nor does it want to leave schools in peace. If they did, there would be no need for OFSTED. As I have pointed out before, Emile Durkheim wrote of the "dialectic of ends and means" whereby a means to an end becomes an end in itself. We have no better example of this than the history of OFSTED.
    The next educational conjuring trick that has been presented by a politician comes from no less a person than Mrs Nicky Morgan, Michael Gove's successor as Education Secretary. Mrs Morgan has said:"We will expect every pupil by the age of 11 to know their times tables off by heart, to perform long division and complex multiplication and to be able to read a novel,".
    The implication of Mrs Morgan's comment is that schools are not teaching times tables, long division, long multiplication or anything else. As a teacher for 33 years, I can state with some authority that this is utter rubbish. Having taught in a number of schools in Liverpool and London, both as a full time member of staff and as a supply teacher, I can say that I have never been in a school where these subjects were not included in the teaching of Numeracy. In every school where I have taught, there have been regular weekly tables tests from Year 3 to Year 6. Also, Mrs Morgan does not give examples of the novels she expects children to read that are appropriate for their reading levels. I believe that Mrs Morgan and her advisers (including Michael Gove), if they implement their new measures, will, in several years time, trumpet their achievements in improving results for knowledge of times tables by 11 year olds. In other words, they will take credit for what is being done already. Paul Daniels could do no better.